


Provenir

by ecotone



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Ahamkara, Awoken Lore, Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 09:52:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16015472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecotone/pseuds/ecotone
Summary: Esila, and stories, and consequences.





	Provenir

She is not the first Awoken born, but she is one of them. 

Sila plans the date of her birth carefully, under the consultation of eutechs and star-maps and storytellers. On the morning Esila is born the twin rings cast dual shadows down onto them, darkening the Distributary’s pale grass and white rocks. She is born among the glow-ferns and shining flowers, dark above and light below. The eutechs sing her into being as a metaphor amongst metaphors: Esila of the light and dark, of the twin rings, of the Awoken. 

And so Esila grows, slowly and joyously, unaware of the Sanguine and the Eccaleists and all that will follow them. She chases opal-cutters and glass-snakes through the gardens, follows winding hunter-paths through the starfruit trees. Her mother watches her carefully, and when she is in Court the eight hundred ninety one take turns leading her on walks to the Shipspire. She is not old enough to know their names, but centuries later she will still remember the smell of lightwood and metal. 

Esila grows, and her mother plies her with stories in the evenings to keep her mind off other things. She tells her daughter of the World and Unworld, the first council, the tales of the stars in the milk-bright sky. Esila hears these stories, and remembers them, and begins weaving her own— the life of the snake she had seen by the fish-pond, what she saw in the museum Aunt Ei had taken her to. 

The fighting grows worse, and Esila turns inward from a perfect world towards a more perfect one. She is older now, old enough to explore without a babysitter, though with the Theodicy War her mother seldom lets her past the garden gate. So she makes her own path out of the gates, writes her way down the old hunt-paths long ago abandoned in favor of richer prey. She learns to walk where she could not go before: under the Crystalline Lakes, into the jewel-caves of the Andalayas. The stars become a carpet and she buries her face in them when the funeral barges throw up smoke. Here she does not need to think of politics and debts and death. Here she can dream of the stars. 

The War stops, eventually, and Esila rejoins the world with the caution of a child who has had decades of peace shattered by death. But she heals, carefully, and those who remain take great interest in the stories she has written in the loving confines of her house. She sits at the base of the tree in her garden, among the tulips and the queensheart, reads passages and chapters and sometimes whole volumes to her family and friends and curious Corsairs. After a time Queen Alis, draped in amethyst and obsidian, comes to hear her speak. She clutches Wadj, shaking, before she takes her seat at the base of the tree. She is convinced that nothing she has made will suit Alis Li, world-maker, star-setter, queen of them all. 

She speaks well. Alis Li, the woman who kept Esila in her lap as she read of the eutech’s new discoveries, and Esila, Distributary-child grown into a woman the Awoken can be proud of. A symbol beyond the wars and the ideological divides. Light and dark, twin rings in orbit. Alis takes Esila’s hands between her own, remembers her first shaky steps on the third floor of the Shipspire, surrounded by eutechs and the eight hundred ninety one and her mother. She’d seen the star-maps and taken off towards them, captivated. 

“You did well,” Alis says, smiling the way she did that day. Open, bright, unlike anything she’s managed in the fifty years since the Wars began. Esila glows in return, bright as the shining agate in the Dawn Caves, bright as an exploding star. 

“Thank you,” Esila replies, smiling as best she can manage without falling into happy-relieved-exhausted tears. “I’ve been looking forward to sharing it.” 

Alis nods. “Where you speak,” the queen tells her, “they will listen.” Esila holds this close to her heart for as long as she remembers it, as long as she lives. 

She speaks, and her people listen. She begins by chronicling their history, the Amrita Charter, the Unworld that became the World, the Yang Liwei that became the Shipspire, AILILIA that became Alis Li. Once their history has all been written she shifts, expands, begins creating her own worlds again. Her stories grow and change as they are told and re-told, and so she begins to write them down, the first fiction of its kind in this new world. The Distributary is fantastic but Esila ventures beyond it, into methane planets and abandoned space stations floating aimlessly beyond the galaxy’s edge. 

She writes of humanity, the world they left behind. The Eccaleists love her tales of Earth, of the people they were before, of what would happen if the Awoken went back to their ancestral home in search of answers. The Sanguine cherish her stories of redemption, of Awoken knights broken and made whole again by the light inside of them, of the lessons taught by the dark. 

Here she is: dual-ringed, two-sided, spinning stories to close the divide between her people. She cannot heal the wound, but she has spent centuries learning, growing, teaching. She can show her people how to look elsewhere, how to reach outwards. 

And they do reach, eventually, under Mara Sov’s guidance. Mara tells them of their universe, of their world, of the gift they were given. Mara tells them of the world beyond. It is a story, and Esila cannot resist a story. She adores her home, loves the flowers and the blue-purple rabbits that chew on the roots of her plants, loves the vanilla sky and the constellations she has charted and named and re-named. She loves her people and the stories they contain. 

But she will run out of stories here. She needs to explore, needs to see how what she has written matches up with the reality-that-is. The Distributary will keep her works safe, keep her name immortal even if she perishes on this journey to the home-that-is-not-home. She will leave that part of herself here, take her body and hands and mind into the world beyond, the world full of possibility. 

Sila does not go. 

Esila begs her mother to come, makes long lists of reasons they should go together. Esila will miss her mother as dearly as Sila will miss her daughter. Sila instilled the love that makes Esila leave in her, just as Sila is unable to part from the home Esila brought into this world. They are at a stalemate, in stasis: running perpendicular. Esila knows they will never meet again. There is no coming back from a journey such as this. 

Esila goes anyway, because she must; Sila stays, because she must. They talk constantly for weeks before the ships leave. Esila records every word her mother says, every sound, every intonation. This she will not write. This she needs to hear, now and forever. 

On the last day Esila sits in the Hull and tells her mother she loves her until the connection severs. In that last frantic second she promises her mother she will write. The last thing she hears from her mother is a laugh, a promise to write back. 

During their journey, Esila sits by the window in the common room and writes every fable, every story, every legend she was ever told. She asks the others for the stories they were read as children, records them, marks the differences that show between tellings. When her hand cramps too badly to write she takes the quiet moments to mourn for her mother, who will outlive her. She thinks of her home, the day they left, the day they were almost shot out of the sky. Esila hopes her mother feels her daughter, alive, in her joints. She hopes her mother will not feel her die. 

When they slow to navigate the asteroid fields and gravity waves, Esila sends letters outward towards home. They will never reach the Distributary, she knows, but the action is enough reason. The thought that maybe her mother will hear her voice in those words. 

She writes her way through the journey to Earth. Some days, she sits under a tree in the Hull’s greenhouse and retells her oldest stories to those that wish to hear. Some remember her, straight-backed and nervous, the day the first Queen came to listen. Some were not born, and so they hear her stories from her mouth for the first time. 

She misses her tulips, some days. 

But Esila is not consumed by her grief. She makes the journey to the home-that-is-not-home, and something beyond elation floods her when the Traveler appears on the viewscreen. 

Sometimes she forgets she is still growing. She has been aging faster, after they left the Distributary, but compared to humanity the pace is still glacially slow. Here she is, child and woman, wise and famed and impatient and young. Esila is carried over the crowd of Awoken, those that have fed on her stories for centuries, and becomes their voice once again. She already loves this place as much as she loves her people, and that is exhilarating and frightening. 

Her people simmer, and argue, and fight until one day they are unable to stop. She is much older now than she was during the Theodicy War, but when the riot breaks out she feels the same urge to stick her head in the carpet of the stars and never resurface. But she pays attention, this time, records and catalogues who leaves, who goes beyond to Earth, who leaves themselves behind to chase a memory of a life. It is her duty, when there are so few Awoken left— fewer now, and her the only such historian among them. 

In the end, she does not follow her kin to Earth. In doing so, in staying behind, she better understands her mother: bound to a place, bound to observe, to have what you love move away, unable to follow. She writes her longest letter yet, sends it spinning upwards towards Sila, towards home. 

She records Mara’s coronation, the arrival of the Ahamkara, the creation of the Dreaming City. Mara names the sprawling gardens after her, and in gratitude she writes her first poem in eight hundred years. 

After their creation, she spends much of her time in the Gardens. She updates her history books, edits older stories, molds ideas into new tales to be shared. Every evening she walks down the bridge to the great tree, the one Mara had planted herself, the one that looks so much like the one from home-the-Distributary. Most days, Awoken and Ahamkara meet her there; they listen to her stories and histories and share their own. This place is hers, and she adores it in the way she adored that first sight of Earth. 

Esila daughter of Sila grows and ages slowly but is still so young, so lighthearted. On the second solstice Azirim comes to her and lies and she knows it but he reminds her of one of the first stories she ever wrote, about a Corsair who shot a man with her bow and traveled the Distributary doing good in an attempt to repent. She is not Sanguine, but she adores a tale of redemption. 

She agrees to listen. She will die for it. This is history in action: the consequences of her mercy.

They gather in her gardens to watch the sun set. There, the corsairs and young techeuns listen to his story, as they have listened to hers. She relishes the chance to listen instead of speak, even as she writes down Azirim’s tales. The Ahamkara lie, she knows, but there are truths buried somewhere underneath. 

She watches the crowd, sees history within it— Owome’s great-granddaughter, Kelda’s oldest niece. She watches that history listen, and sing, and die. She watches Azirim speak, and sing, and kill them all. 

Esila daughter of Sila listens, and records, and sings, and falls. As she plummets, she sees the stars. Above her, in the sky of the Dreaming City, she imagines two rings.

**Author's Note:**

> 'New minor character I adore' alert
> 
> Thanks for reading! <3 Comments appreciated, as always. (I wrote this in one sitting so please tell me if anything's strange!)


End file.
